Patricia wrote:
> I have never heard the term "high" fantasy before (and I've been reading
> fantasy for a long time). I tend to divide fantasy into two parts,
> certainly. One part is "heroic" fantasy (stories of heroic quests and
> magic, in implicitly or explicitly "other worlds"), which would include
> Tolkein, Donaldson, Cherryh, most of Hambly, and Eddings.
The term "high" fantasy, in my experience, is usually used interchangeably
with "heroic" fantasy. I tend to think of the authors you mentioned above
as "high" fantasy, while "heroic" fantasy is a broader category that also
includes pulp stories like Conan, or the more recent Hawk and Fisher books.
But that's just my personal definition, YMMV.
> The other
> would be "modern urban fantasy", as exemplified by Esther Friesner, and
> Hambly in "Bride of the Rat God".
This certainly covers most of the genre. But there are a great many books
that fit neither category, like Ellen Kushner's "Swordspoint" or Delia
Sherman's "The Porcelain Dove," and those tend to be my favorites. Michael
Swanwick, in a somewhat controversial essay, once tried to categorize such
books as "hard fantasy," but the term didn't really stick.
> I would distinguish both from what is
> usually shelved in bookstores as "occult and horror", which I avoid
> unless I absolutely cannot find anything else. I don't know whether this
> third group could be called "low" fantasy - it's certainly
> fantastic! Does this help?
>
I've never heard "low" fantasy defined as a category, even by people who
use the term "high" fantasy. One interesting thing I've noticed about
occult and horror books, though -- if they're really good, the publisher
usually markets them as fantasy. Laurel K. Hamilton and Tanya Huff are
a good case in point.
--
Marina Frants
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http://www.sff.net/people/FrantsDeCandido/
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